This feels like having it both ways. "Innovation is morally neutral" and "harmful uses are the inevitable consequences of innovation" can't both be true.
I would prefer to say that the act of creating a possibility is different from the act of exercising that possibility in a particular way. But you seem to be saying that merely creating the possibility makes the use inevitable, and so the person who invents the tiny cameras or the image-recognition software is inescapably responsible for the use of that technology to target political dissidents.
I agree that once the invention has been made, it becomes harder to stop someone from using the invention in bad ways. But the moral responsibility is clearly with the person who makes bad use of technology, not with the person who invented it (assuming that the technology was not invented specifically for that purpose).
> This feels like having it both ways. "Innovation is morally neutral" and "harmful uses are the inevitable consequences of innovation" can't both be true.
I agree with you and I think I confused myself. What I mean is that technology has no inherent morality. It's not good, bad or neutral. You could judge a certain application in those terms, but you are really judging the morality of the user. Say a knife, it can be used as a cooking tool or a killing too. That is not to say the knife is good or bad, but that the user and his intentions are.
> so the person who invents the tiny cameras or the image-recognition software is inescapably responsible for the use of that technology to target political dissidents
I wouldn't really say that either. Unless the person was actively trying to make spy things to target political dissidents.
> it becomes harder to stop someone from using the invention in bad ways
The bad ways are not always clear. I will quote Freud from Civilization and Its Discontents.
"One would like to ask: is there, then, no positive gain in pleasure, no unequivocal
increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear the voice of a child
of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time
after a friend has reached his destination that he has come through the long and difficult
voyage unharmed? Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in enormously
reducing infant mortality and the danger of infection for women in childbirth, and,
indeed, in considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man?"
"If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his
native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if travelling across the
ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-
voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What is the use of
reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest
restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear
no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we
have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage.... And, finally, what good
to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we
can only welcome death as a deliverer?"
I would prefer to say that the act of creating a possibility is different from the act of exercising that possibility in a particular way. But you seem to be saying that merely creating the possibility makes the use inevitable, and so the person who invents the tiny cameras or the image-recognition software is inescapably responsible for the use of that technology to target political dissidents.
I agree that once the invention has been made, it becomes harder to stop someone from using the invention in bad ways. But the moral responsibility is clearly with the person who makes bad use of technology, not with the person who invented it (assuming that the technology was not invented specifically for that purpose).